Alex Salmond

The first and natural reaction to Alex Salmond launching a new party is that he is a bitter egotist who will set back the cause of independence by splitting the nationalist vote in the Scottish parliament elections on 6 May.

This is quite wrong. He is a bitter egotist who will set back the cause of independence by trying to manipulate the electoral system. Salmond has a cunning plan to exploit a flaw in Scotland’s “proportional” system to try to give nationalists a disproportionate share of seats. But it is too clever by half.

It is not even his cunning plan. It has been canvassed by other people for some time. George Galloway has a unionist version of it, an outfit called All For Unity, designed to take advantage of the added-member system of proportional representation.

The Scottish system sounds lovely in theory, and it enjoyed widespread support when it was brought in as part of the devolution changes in 1998. The system, similar to that designed by the Allies for West Germany after the war, gives people two votes: one for a constituency MSP and one for a party. A bit more than half the Scottish parliament is elected by first past the post, like the House of Commons, but then additional members are elected from regional lists to “top up” each party’s representation.

This usually produces roughly proportional results, but there is a catch. Salmond’s plan is to launch a second Scottish National Party that will compete only for the top-up seats. The SNP itself won’t win many top-up seats, because it will win so many of the first-past-the-post seats that it will not be entitled to them. But if SNP voters cast their second vote for Alba, Salmond’s new party, it will win some of those seats instead. By splitting their votes, nationalists can cheat a system designed to produce proportional results to elect extra MSPs.

This already happens to a limited extent, in that the Green Party, which also supports independence, benefits from some SNP voters lending it their second votes. But Salmond wants to supercharge that tactic, to produce what he calls a nationalist “supermajority” in the Scottish parliament.

The mechanics of the plan are sound. Salmond may be unpopular in Scotland, but people know who he is and his party will gain a lot of publicity. The name is clever, the Gaelic for “Scotland” (although the etymology is unionist: it is from the same root as Albion), and will cause huge free-advertising rows about impartiality, because it is also the name of the BBC’s Scottish-language channel. However, it turns out that the electoral commission has already approved the name — the party was registered last month. So the new party is likely to exceed the threshold it needs to win top-up seats: it needs 5-7 per cent of the vote depending on the region. As a device for electing more nationalist MSPs, therefore, the plan is likely to succeed. But to what end?

Launching Salmond’s epic personal vendetta against Nicola Sturgeon as the main storyline of the election campaign is hardly going to benefit the wider nationalist cause. It is obvious from all that has happened this year that he sees her as his apprentice who has turned to the dark side: it is not a promising basis for a partnership in parliament to press the case for a second independence referendum. On the contrary, Salmond’s intervention will undermine the case that Sturgeon was preparing to make. She hoped that, if the SNP won a majority of seats on a platform that included the demand for a new referendum, this would make a democratic argument that would embarrass Boris Johnson. Her plan was already faltering before Salmond returned to the stage. The SNP has slipped in the opinion polls, and it was already looking as if she might have to rely on the Greens to give her a majority again. Even so, a majority for the SNP plus the Greens would do, for the purposes of claiming a mandate for a second referendum.

Now Salmond has destroyed that case. If supporters of a second referendum — SNP, Alba and Greens — win a combined majority by manipulating the electoral system, they will hand a moral victory to their opponents. I foresee endless arguments about whether or not 50 per cent of people voted for parties demanding a second referendum.